I’m Going to Cherish Every Moment (Even If It Kills Me)

I’m Going to Cherish Every Moment (Even If It Kills Me)

I became one of those moms last night, with the toddler throwing herself down across the entryway to the store, causing patrons to pause as they looked from her to me and then back down at her, unsure if they should just mince their way around the screaming child, whose catalyst for such a meltdown was that she simply did not want to be stowed in the cart.

Earlier this week, her four-year-old sister had a similar meltdown. My friend and I took our children to a botanical garden that is two hours away. Everything went well—we walked the pathways, pointed out the various plants, slurped on organic Popsicles at the juice bar down the road—but then, on the way home, my four-year-old got hot. The weather’s been hovering at 91 degrees for days on end, and the air conditioner was doing a poor job keeping up with the sun saturating the black dashboard.

I flipped the vents back toward my daughter, but she continued to cry. The episode might’ve lasted for five minutes or thirty. All I know’s that it was so bad, I lost track of time. In the middle of it, I looked over at my friend and said, “Parenting is so hard.”

“I know,” she said.

And yet, earlier that day, I had seen the older women—walking the botanical gardens—looking at our children with this undeniable nostalgia. I was in the middle of pushing a massive two-seater stroller that took up a majority of the path, and my children, of course, preferred to walk. It was hot, and they were hot, and I could smell that my youngest needed changed.

Regardless, those women looked at our haggard little troop with an expression that told me this is one of the best stages of my life.

Once I got the diaper changed, and we left to go to the juice bar, my toddler smeared her melting berry Popsicle all over her chubby, white legs. A woman watched her with this enigmatic smile. I used a napkin to clean up the juice and seeds puddled on the wood floor of the porch, and then I used a new napkin to clean my daughter’s face and hands. It was time to leave, but my toddler—surprise, surprise—did not want to.

Have you ever noticed children reserve their worst behavior for the public?

She started crying and flailing, and though she weighs all of twenty-eight pounds, it was like trying to wrangle an electric eel with teeth. I needed to reapply my deodorant by the time I walked past the woman with the tastefully highlighted hair and dark sunglasses. She was still watching us, and she was still smiling.

Exasperated, I blew up my sweaty bangs. “It’s hilarious from your viewpoint, isn’t it?” I said, trying to smile.

“Yes,” she said, white grin widening. “Because mine are twenty-six and twenty-eight.”

One hour later is when my four-year-old decided she was hot.

I looked over at my friend, once my daughter finally calmed down, and whispered, “One day my girls will be twenty-six and twenty-eight.”

I thought of that again last night, in Sam’s Club, when my toddler decided to sprawl (for the second time) across the dirty concrete floor.

I thought of that when I was carrying her up to the darkened house, and she said, “Sorry, Mommy,” and laid her pale blond head on my chest.

I thought of that when my daughters decided to “fix” my hair with a pick that made me wince each time it connected with my head.

I thought of that when my eldest did so well in the therapy class for her eyes that tears came to my own.

I thought of that when my daughters stopped fighting long enough to share, or when my two-year-old said, “I need you, Mommy,” or when I stepped into my bedroom to deposit some laundry, and my suddenly grown-up four-year-old called, “You didn’t give me my goodnight kiss.”

The women who have raised children tell us, who are in the midst of raising children, to “cherish every moment,” not because these moments are easy, but because one day we will not remember the temper tantrums and the spills. Instead, we will remember the life-saving moments in between that caused our hearts to sigh and expand with tangible, thrumming love.

How do you cherish the harder parts of motherhood?